Abstract

The advantages of a Multi-Chip Module (MCM) product are its low-power and small-size.
But the design of an MCM system usually requires weeks of engineering effort, thus
we need a generic MCM substrate with programmable interconnections to accelerate
system prototyping. In this paper, we propose a Symmetric and Programmable MCM
(SPMCM) substrate for this purpose. This SPMCM substrate consists of a symmetrical
array of slots for bare-chip attachment and Field Programmable Interconnect Chips
(FPICs) for substrate routing. Experimental results demonstrate that our FPIC polygonal
routing module uses 12% less switches than the conventional routing module
for interconnecting bare-chip slots with 84 pads. Also, experiments are conducted to
determinate proper parameters for the VLSI implementation of our FPIC.